We created the following reviews after conducting an in-depth briefing with each vendor. Our analysis focuses on each product’s key differentiators and is designed to help companies create a short list of products to evaluate. We feel this is the appropriate role of a research firm rather than to rank and rate vendors, which is a slippery slope for many reasons.
Crux
Crux offers a managed or SaaS service for quickly building and maintaining data pipelines from external data sources. Currently geared to financial services.
Founded in 2017, Crux is laser-focused on the buy side of the data commerce market. It addresses the data integration pain that customers experience when working with thousands of data sets from dozens or hundreds of third-party data suppliers. Crux offers both a 24×7 managed service and a new, self-service SaaS product that together accelerate the creation of data pipelines that integrate external data with customer data warehouses, data lakes, and reports. Crux offloads this nitty gritty work from data engineers, freeing them to focus on other data issues and initiatives. Crux currently manages 50,000 data pipelines on behalf of customers.
Crux is currently geared to financial services firms, including hedge funds, investment banks, and asset managers, which consume large volumes of external data from numerous third-party data brokers, such as Morningstar, Moody’s, and FactSet. Crux models these data sources so they can be quickly onboarded and integrated with existing customer data. Crux plans to branch out to other industries, including insurance, real estate, and supply chain. Crux has 120 employees and is well funded with $166 million in Series B financing.
Unlike other players in the market, Crux does not facilitate commercial transactions between data buyers and sellers. Rather, it helps data buyers integrate datasets they’ve already purchased. In essence, Crux functions as an extension of a company’s internal data engineering team focused exclusively on external data integration. Besides financial services firms, data marketplace vendors, such as Google Cloud Marketplace, use Crux as a back-end data ingestion engine.
Customers can choose from a suite of data engineering services. For example, Crux Deliver ingests and integrates data from 265+ sources using custom connectors and creates a custom, AI-driven catalog of external datasets; Crux Verify performs validation checks on incoming data to identify data quality issues, anomalies, data drift, and schema changes; Crux Wrangle enriches, validates, combines, and transforms source data to match the format and schema of the customer’s target system.
Databricks
Databricks Delta Sharing uses open protocol that supports cross-cloud, cross-region, and cross-database data sharing without copying or moving data assets. Best used with Databricks Unity Catalog and Databricks Lakehouse.
Databricks Delta Sharing makes it easy for data providers to securely share large volumes of data across any cloud platform, cloud region, or data management system without moving or copying data. Databricks data sharing is based on an open data sharing protocol and is not bound to any proprietary technology. The only requirement is that data providers store data in the Delta Live Table or Parquet format and use the open data sharing protocol. The protocol is a simple REST API consisting of pre-signed URLs that give recipients read-only access to specific addresses in a scalable, cloud object store. This approach makes it easy for data providers to share petabytes of data with large numbers of data consumers who gain access to live, not replicated, content.
Launched in late 2022, Delta Sharing enables data providers to share a range of data assets—SQL tables, views, unstructured data, machine learning models, dashboards, and notebooks—essentially, anything whose data lives in a cloud object store. This makes it easy for data providers to share data products with dozens of target destinations without managing file transfers or complex APIs. For example, one Databricks customer uses Delta Sharing to send its data products to 57 data marketplaces. Data clients that currently support the data sharing protocol are Power BI, Tableau, Pandas, Apache Spark, and Java. To manage and audit shared data assets, data providers can use Databricks Unity Catalog, which is natively integrated with Delta Sharing. However, if companies want to avoid proprietary technology, they can use SQL commands or the Delta Sharing user interface.
Dawex
The Dawex Data Exchange Platform powers data marketplaces, data exchanges, and data hubs in 20 sectors around the world, including many government and industry marketplaces.
Founded in Lyon, France in 2015, Dawex is a leading provider of data exchange technology that powers many government-, industry-, and consortium-based data marketplaces and data exchange platforms across more than twenty sectors around the world. As an early mover in the industry, it has helped evangelize the role of data exchanges in the new data economy and establish policies governing the exchange of data. It sits on the Data Policy Group of the World Economic Forum, which named it a Technology Pioneer, and has been invited to speak on data ecosystems at the organization’s Annual Meeting in Davos. Not surprisingly, Dawex has designed its platform to ensure adherence to international and regional privacy, security and data regulations. Dawex has 50 employees spread across three offices—Lyon, Paris, and Montreal—and has raised €28 million since inception.
The company’s Data Exchange Platform is a customizable, white-labeled SaaS product that organizations can use for internal or external data exchanges. Dawex customers operate the exchange to meet their own data product needs (either as a large supplier or consumer) or to serve a broader community, such as an industry, consortium, or government-led initiative. Operators select fields that suppliers use to describe their products, payment options, supported languages, licensing terms, and privacy policies. Operators can define account plans governing usage, contracts, and billing options and customize the onboarding process, which authenticates and verifies all participants. The platform offers robust activity reporting.
The Dawex data exchange runs on any cloud data platform and lets data suppliers specify a cloud region to store their data to ensure compliance and performance. Data suppliers can upload data in 25+ file formats and distribute data to consumers via file transfer for one-time exchange or API for recurring transfers. They can also make the data available directly to consumers, outside of the exchange in a peer-to-peer mode, although the exchange still tracks the workflow. Data suppliers confirm compliance with relevant data regulations, set pricing, and create custom contracts and terms, leveraging templates provided by Dawex or the operator, if desired.
Data consumers search the data marketplace by keywords, license type, business sectors, data domains, or geographic coverage, to name a few examples. They can also specify alerts that notify them when a supplier publishes relevant data products. For each data product, consumers can view column-level descriptions, sample data, and pricing and license options. They can also open a dialogue with a supplier to discuss licensing terms and distribution methods. Dawex licenses its Data Exchange Platform in three- to five-year periods, the yearly fee being based on numerous factors, such as the type of data exchange, the deployment configuration, the ramp up phase, and geographic scope.
Harbr
The Harbr Data Commerce Platform provides a data storefront for internal and external marketplaces, enabling providers and consumers to securely collaborate and manipulate data.
Launched in May 2020, Harbr is a new cloud-based data commerce platform and one of the fastest growing. Based in London and New York, the company has raised $52 million in funding and more than 300 organizations use its software globally. The company sells to large, established data providers, including Moody’s and CoreLogic, that want a white-labeled data storefront and secure collaboration to amplify their data business. It also sells to early-stage data providers that want to monetize new collections of data assets and to enterprises that want an internal data marketplace to foster data sharing and collaboration among business units.
As a data commerce platform, Harbr enables organizations to create their own internal or external data marketplaces. Customers deploy the Harbr platform on a private cloud within AWS or Google Cloud Platform and store marketplace data in an adjacent AWS or GCP cloud environment, which they manage. The platform enables customer experiences like discovery, evaluation, and customization without moving the data. When a consumer purchases a data product, Harbr automates the movement of data to any destination in the cloud or on-premises. Alternatively, the data provider can push the data directly to the consumer outside of Harbr, although Harbr maintains information about the product, subscriptions, and consumer interaction.
The company’s secret sauce is a secure collaboration capability, called Spaces, that enables data providers and data consumers to interact in real-time. A Space is a secure, on-demand compute environment, like a clean room, where consumers can view and manipulate data using popular open-source tools, such as RStudio, Anaconda, Spark, Zeppelin, Hue, and Superset. Working together in Spaces, data providers and consumers can streamline product evaluations, execute models via APIs, and build higher-value, customized products that Harbr maintains.
Informatica
Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace turns assets from the Informatica Catalog into data products in the Cloud Data Marketplace. It’s a service in the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud.
Informatica offers a unique perspective among current data exchange platform vendors: it focuses solely on internal data marketplaces. This makes sense once you realize that the Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace evolved from Informatica’s push into data governance. Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace offers a user-friendly graphical interface that makes it easy for business owners to publish data assets from Informatica and other data catalogs, so data consumers can browse, select, and access those assets, subject to approval. The platform delivers curated datasets and machine learning models through a variety of channels, including desktop download, an application programming interface (API), or file transfer to a specific application, such as Microsoft Power BI.
Informatica Cloud Data Marketplace is a cloud-native storefront that runs as a service alongside Informatica Data Governance and Catalog within the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud. This makes it easy for data owners to move curated assets from the data catalog into the Informatica data marketplace. The assets reference curated metadata from the catalog, including data quality scores, data lineage, certification status, and user ratings and sensitivity. Asset owners only need to augment the metadata by specifying access methods and licensing terms (e.g., who can use the asset for how long and for what purpose), among other things. The platform integrates with third party products, such as Alation and Collibra, and supports consumption-based pricing.
Narrative.io
Narrative is a SaaS service that publishes data products and a canonical model which enables data consumers to query across external data sources. Narrative also runs its own data marketplace.
Founded in 2016, Narrative provides data commerce software that makes it easy for companies to buy, sell, and share data. Uniquely, Narrative enables buyers to purchase data from numerous sources through a single query and pay only for the data that meets their specific criteria. Buyers build a query by selecting from more than 100 attributes, which they can filter by sub-attribute, value, and price. They also specify query frequency (hourly, daily, weekly) and duration (days or months), degree of data deduplication, and endpoints (currently an AWS S3 bucket, Facebook Ads Manager account, or The Trade Desk). Buyers can also set budgets for purchases for a given period and by dataset (i.e., cost per thousand records).
For sellers, Narrative’s GUI-based, SaaS software makes it easy to ingest data, create datasets and data products, launch a custom data store, and deliver data to downstream endpoints. In fact, many sellers use Narrative to create highly granular data products and distribute them to Narrative’s data marketplace and other sales channels. Sellers mark which fields they want to make available for sale, define constraints (e.g., “U.S. values only”), and specify a price (i.e., cost per thousand records). They can also specify which companies can purchase the dataset (“allow listing”) and exclude companies from purchasing the dataset (“block listing”).
A unique feature of Narrative is its ability to map data fields to a canonical model. When sellers upload data sets, Narrative automatically identifies fields and labels and maps them to canonical attributes it has defined, if desired. This enables buyers to query multiple data sets using a single model, simplifying the process of purchasing and integrating third-party data.
Narrative also runs its own data marketplace, called the Data Streams Marketplace, that currently provides access to data from over 50 data suppliers, encompassing more than 3 petabytes of data, including more 2 billion identifiers (i.e., email, cookies, mobile IDs) and 5 trillion events. Companies, such as Nielsen, use the marketplace to enrich their offline customer data with digital identifiers and demographic information from multiple countries and regions around the world, saving their technical teams thousands of hours monthly.
Besides data enrichment services, the marketplace enables buyers to find and subscribe to hundreds of single-source data products. Narrative also offers an app store that provides value-added services, such as a tool to evaluate the quality of supplier data, a PII hasher for email addresses, and a recommendation engine that alerts customers to relevant data sets based on their requirements.
Revelate
The Revelate Data Marketplace Solution runs the world’s largest data marketplaces, including one with 75,000 data products.
Founded in 2012, Revelate has helped companies monetize data assets longer than any other data marketplace vendor. Revelate powers the world’s largest public data marketplace, operated by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (CME Group), which offers more than 75,000 data products. Based in Montreal, Revelate was founded by four individuals with capital markets backgrounds who recognized a need to streamline the distribution, fulfillment, and consumption of financial data products. Revelate’s customers today include financial services firms, including the world’s largest exchanges and banks along with academic and sports entertainment clients. The company recently received $20 million in Series A funding to expand its footprint in other industries.
Revelate turns data assets into data products and makes them easily accessible to data consumers through an external or internal marketplace. Its Data Marketplace Solution is a SaaS offering that provides a configurable data sharing infrastructure to power white-labeled marketplaces. Revelate customers (i.e., data suppliers) connect their data to the marketplace, create data products via a point-and-click GUI, and display them in a catalog. Customers browse, select, and purchase data products which Revelate distributes to customers via multiple formats and methods, including SFTP, API, web downloads, cloud buckets, and data shares.
Revelate offers deep integration with Databricks and Snowflake, so those customers can quickly create a storefront for monetizing and sharing data. Revelate customers can use their own billing and licensing system or they can use Revelate’s, which supports various licensing and payment options, including subscription, one-time, or usage-based pricing. Customers control what products are displayed to whom and how they can access them. Rich administrative features enable customers to manage product inventory, track purchases, and monitor data distribution activity.
Snowflake
Snowflake was the first data platform vendor to offer technology that lets customers selectively share data without replicating or moving it. It also offers its own data marketplace.
Snowflake’s unique global, multi-tenant architecture allows customers to share data with other Snowflake customers without copying or moving data. This revolutionizes data sharing and reshapes the notion of how a data marketplace can work. Companies no longer need to configure and secure file transfers or APIs, format data sets, or create and maintain data pipelines. Once activated, a data share creates a pointer to the object in the provider’s virtual database that authorized users can view, query, and join with their own data in Snowflake. Best of all, these data shares—which may consist of datasets, views, database functions, or applications—work across all Snowflake accounts, no matter which region on which cloud platform they’re running (i.e., Azure, Google, or AWS). This is the essence of seamless, global data sharing.
The only hitch, of course, is that a company must have a Snowflake account to create or receive a data share. This is also true if a company wants to access Snowflake’s public data marketplace, use a data clean room hosted by Snowflake or a third-party partner, or participate in a private data exchange created by a Snowflake customer. To broaden access, Snowflake enables companies to create accounts for free and pay only if they query data. Additionally, Snowflake customers can activate “reader accounts” on behalf of data trading partners.
Snowflake has also extended its data sharing to work across regions and cloud platforms. If a Snowflake customer wants to share data with a partner on another cloud platform or region, they configure the data share to replicate to the new environment. Snowflake then syncs the data share for the duration of the agreement and can give other partners in the same environment access to the data share without additional replication.
Launched in 2019, the Snowflake Data Marketplace is a fast-growing public space that now has 310+ data providers and 1,600+ listings in 18 categories. Most data providers are data brokers or data aggregators who see the marketplace as another channel; only a fraction today are traditional enterprise customers, but that could change given how easy Snowflake makes it to share and commercialize data. Data providers use a point-and-click interface to control who can access their listings and what objects they want to share (e.g., tables, views, rows, functions, apps) and with whom. To accelerate data evaluations, data providers can also provide revocable access to a sample data set or time-bound trials to an entire data set. They set prices by usage (i.e., per query), duration (e.g., by month) or a combination of the two. Snowflake handles the billing for a 10% fee. Data providers can also arrange payments outside the platform.